Introduction Translating Texts, Translating Cultures

Abstract

The essays gathered in this symposium were originally presented in the summer of 2004 at a workshop on Texts, Translating Cultures. Hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences at its bucolic conference center Schos Blankensee, the workshop was held in conjunction with the preparation of a critical edition of the writings of Buber, a multi-volume project co-sponsored by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.1 The theme of the workshop appropriately reflected one of Buber's principal concerns, whose life's work was described by his close associate Ernst Akiva Simon to build bridges. As explicated at length in my contribution to the symposium, Martin Buber: A Builder of Bridges, from virtually the very beginning of his more than sixty year career as an author and public intellectual, he was engaged in varied and ramified efforts to facilitate what we today would call inter-cultural understanding. The translation of texts and cultures was, indeed, his metier. Perhaps at first, but intuitively, he attached to his various publications of presenting translations of texts -from inter alia Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, Greek, Persian, Polish, and of course Hebrew and Yiddish into German a political significance. Growing up in the multi-cultural and multi-lingual world of the Hapsburg Empire, he very early realized that it was insufficient to live merely next-to-one another (nebeneinander), to tolerate the presence of the other but without genuinely acknowledging the existential reality of